I could give a rats arse what kind of data the tool shows for me OR my clients, but that is not the point at all. It’s one SEO’s opinion about link data anyway, so I don’t care about that. If the firm had been totally honest and not deceitful at all about what they were doing and had been doing for quite awhile now, not much would have been said, other than the fact the tool is really a rogue scraper. The fact his firm promotes themselves as do-gooders to the SEO industry and best practices, etc, makes what he has done and how they did it, all the more pathetic.

[Again, off-topic rants blurred …]

Frankly, I don’t care about the data they publish, those are available elsewhere for free. Technically spoken, the offered on-page ‘noindex’ directive offers a way to opt out partially, but that’s IMHO just a legal thingy. BTW the same legal butt covering that all major engines do practice since Web search exists, without much whining across the boards. So that’s not the point.

The point is that a SEO company should be way more sensible than a search engine when it comes to Webmaster concerns. Part of the canonical way to launch such SEO tools is a simple procedure to opt-out without hassles, and in a timely manner. Probably very few folks would actually opt out when such an option comes with the first product release. Now every dog and its fleas, well, flee.

@Sebastian; you wrote:
“and whether or not the method(s) given to Webmasters are reasonable or not”

Any method having to do advertising SEOMOZ in all pages head tag’s is not reasonable at all. It’s a “linkage” tool, so meta tag blocking is not possible. He knows that.

Besides all of that; did you see his latest statement about his tool and methods? He stated he was a rogue bot with not much anyone can do about it. I paraphrased.

But anyway; he chooses to run his firm in this fashion, so we can choose how we wish to continue to view his firm. The industry will decide as a whole.

Again Sebastian; thanks for putting the definitions out there extremely concise and clear.

thanks for the compliment. In the sense of my statement above I had to blur your rant. Everything you said can be found in endless variations at Sphinn and various blogs discussing the LinkScape launch. I don’t think that it’s helpful to spread repetitive rants. Rand has no chance to reply to every post on gazillions of SEO hangouts, and that doesn’t fit my understanding of fairness in a professional discussion.

I want to keep the comments to this post on topic. The point is crawling vs. indexing, respectively whether or not it’s possible to opt out of possible crawls that feed only the LinkScape index, and whether or not the method(s) given to Webmasters are reasonable or not. BTW, Rand has announced that his team will apply changes to the current system by the end of this year. From a developers POV this timeline is reasonable, although I do think that this functionality should have been an essential part of the concept, delivered with the very first product release. For example a refetch of outdated robots.txt files to check for (new) exclusionary statements before an index update should be doable in a system of that size.

Thanks for your understanding.
Sebastian